Oh no.
I found an old journal.
Talking about old times. The words rose from the page like that secondhand smoke I used to endure.
When I used to play the bars before I could drink in them, my guitars and amps would reek from that stale smoke in the blinding rays of Sunday morning.
The Sunday after a gig, the souls of those Marlboros settled on the gear would waft to life, hover in the air, painting scenes of old burgundy Chryslers, orange Motel 6 curtains, and Richard Petty. I don’t know why. That’s just the flavor.
Smell is like that.
So are sounds. The Buena Vista Social Club is on the stereo in the bright of Now, speaking of a Cuba I never knew, or that Ry Cooder, the producer who found the pre-revolutionary musicians and recorded them never knew either.
Castro can murder with moderate success, the grandfather clock with more still, but something lingers.
Something that once was, back in Cuba, something that might have been, when I was only slightly younger in DC. The sounds make me remember.
I’m in traffic again on Route 1 north, the afternoon heat boiling off the pavement. The side mirror seethes, reflecting a thousand cars behind me, and jungle apartments of people I never knew. The buildings stand tall over the road, mysterious, an occasional plant on a balcony, looking Latin in the Mid-Atlantic, a portal to parallel universes of lives where I did know the people there. Maybe I’d marry the girl in 832, and try to look calm in this stupid white shirt when I met her family back in Tegucigalpa. But then the light turns green and I inch forward three car lengths, and try not to lose my temper.
Sounds are like that.
That something that will always be in that haunting trumpet note. When the last one sounds, maybe it’ll be a muted one like they used to play in Havana. (That would be my undoing.)
And words are like that.
The journal says I’m driving home on a Friday night to a place that would always seem like home, hearing a high school song on the classic rock station. No, no, that must be a mistake.
But it wasn’t then, and surely isn’t now.
Nostalgia rises from the pages, Richard Petty’s secondhand smoke, all the Friday nights at once.
The dew-soaked bare feet hiding and seeking, the punk rock club and bad guitar played louder, the Chinese food and movies and uncertainty and big plans, the salsa clubs and the street music and the most beautiful girl in the world slipping off into purple shadows down the avenue on her way to somewhere I wasn’t going, and frogs and the sad scent of late summer and a hazy quarter moon looking down as I listened to high school songs on the classic rock station.
Words are like that. And so are Friday nights.
Don’t forget to look at the moon.
-Josh
